“What is it, brother?” asked one.
“Muscle dried up, that’s all,” he answered.
“So—o.”
“Then that’s an end to Chaban,” said one of the crowd, referring to one of the most popular dances that Sasha played.
But Sasha took out of his pocket with his right hand a queer black wooden instrument which he had either made in prison or had had given to him, and he put it to his lips and began to play.
Then every one began to dance, and Sasha sat in his place, and all was as before. As Kuprin says at the conclusion of his tale, “Man is for Life, but Art is For Ever.”[[5]]
Such is the orgy unrehearsed. So a tavern can be a popular theatre. It can also be a church, a place of searching after God. In England you sit down in church but stand in the public-house; in Russia you stand in the church but sit in the tavern; it humanises it, makes it more like a home, makes it possible for the tavern to be upon occasion a kind of church.
It is a great national assembly-place.
In Russia you are not allowed to hold a public meeting without the special authorisation of the police and the presence of a police-officer. But in the tavern is a great informal accidental meeting; and a great deal is enacted there that the police have no power to stop. Thus, for instance, in recent years several sects have used the tavern as the place for their prayer meetings, and have had something equivalent to a Salvation Army gathering, not “round the corner,” but actually inside the public-house itself. The religious conspirators have come as it were accidentally, one by one, have ordered their tea, and have started an animated conversation into which, sooner or later, the whole houseful was drawn.